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Modern Age

Elements of European culture had entered the Punjab during the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (r. 1799-1839). The Maharaja employed French officers who trained soldiers in European fighting methods. By the time of the Maharaja's death in 1839, the British East India Company controlled most of South Asia, and annexed the Punjab only a decade later.

With colonialism came elements of Sikh-British cooperation, and Sikhs joined the British army in high numbers. The British not only accommodated Sikh religious differences but encouraged the initiation by the straight-sword and the Singh identity. Rural Punjab underwent transformation as canal colonies were built to expand agricultural cultivation. Villages, towns, and cities saw a greater degree of connectivity due to technological introductions that streamlined travel and communication across previously insurmountable distances.

Along with roads, canals, printing presses, and telegraphs, another British innovation brought a new degree of self-consciousness to colonial-era Sikhs: the census. Beginning in middle of the 19th century, Sikhs began to acknowledge that though they had enjoyed political power in the first half of the century, their proportional representation in the Punjab was less than 10 percent. Nowhere did they form any kind of majority that would result in political prominence in demographics-based British norms where communitarian numbers mattered.

A wide array of responses to the colonial predicament emerged. One can see, for example, the effect of colonial resistance in the rise of the Namdhari movement. But the emergent voice in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that of moderate Sikhs belonging to the Singh Sabha reform organizations, centered in the cities of Lahore and Amritsar. The Singh Sabha movement sought to bring the articulation of Sikh beliefs and conduct in consonance with the demands of modernity, just as Indian Hindu and Muslim organizations were mobilizing for those communities. The reform-minded Sikhs utilized the printing press and educational institutions in the name of articulating a clearer, modern Sikh culture. For example, one of the products of this reform was the Khalsa College, founded in 1892 in Amritsar. This esteemed and aesthetically sophisticated place of higher learning became the most important institution in the production of Sikh academic work.

In the early 20th century, modernist Sikhs built on this foundation. In 1915, the Chief Khalsa Diwan, also a reformist organization, published a normative code of ceremonies and rites called Gurmat Prakash: Bhag Sanskar. A decade later, the Gurdwara Reform Act created the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee (SGPC) to wrest control of historical gurdwaras (places of worship) from local patrons and place their maintenance in the hands of an organization that stood for the broader Sikh populace. Twenty-five years after the SGPC's establishment, it published an even more concrete set of codes than the Chief Khalsa Diwan's, known as Sikh Rahit Maryada, in 1950.